random posts

Monday, 16 April 2018

The always inspiring Nag on the Lake, through the lens of a special textile exhibit hosted at the visitor’s centre of a historic mill located between Glasgow and Edinburgh helps us to place a name and personality to a diverse portfolio of work by an artist arguably best known for his political cartoons, Saul Steinberg. Though commercial work was not his favourite engagement, Steinberg looked as if he took no mean measure of joy in creating textiles and pattern-work, his ornate design The Wedding pictured, and in the 1950s, being able to cotton onto any medium was definitely to the artist’s advantage.As a young man in Romania, his caricatures documented and lampooned the rise of fascism under conditions made it intolerable and he fled across the Atlantic and was granted asylum by the Dominican Republic in 1941. While he waited for his immigration application to the United States to be approved, Steinberg carried on a lively correspondence in cartoons with The New Yorker (previously), and this epistolary relationship informed a career that lasted for nearly six decades.